You're walking through an office building after hours, fluorescent lights humming overhead, your footsteps echoing down corridors that stretch just a little too far. The familiar becomes foreign when emptied of its intended purpose. This is the uncanny territory of liminal space—and it's everywhere in the stories we tell ourselves about fear, isolation, and the spaces between destinations.
Something profound has shifted in how we experience horror and unease. We're no longer just afraid of monsters in the dark; we're terrified of being lost in the light of endless corporate hallways, trapped in the architectural equivalent of a loading screen that never ends.
When Familiar Becomes Infinite
The internet gave us The Backrooms—that viral creepypasta about falling through reality into an infinite maze of yellow office spaces with water-stained ceiling tiles and that particular shade of beige carpet that exists in every waiting room you've ever tried to escape. What started as a single unsettling image became a cultural phenomenon because it tapped into something we all recognize: the horror of being stuck forever in a transitional space.
But this fear didn't begin with internet folklore. Decades earlier, Stanley Kubrick was crafting the same dread in The Shining's Overlook Hotel. Those endless corridors with their geometric carpet patterns weren't just movie sets—they were architectural anxiety made manifest. The hotel becomes a maze where every hallway looks the same, where you can walk forever without arriving anywhere meaningful. Like The Backrooms, the Overlook suggests that the spaces we pass through might actually be infinite, that what should be temporary might become eternal.
Mark Z. Danielewski pushed this concept to its literary extreme in House of Leaves, where a family discovers their house contains a hallway that shouldn't exist—one that grows longer each time they measure it. The house becomes a character that defies physics, creating spaces that exist solely to be traversed, never to be inhabited. It's the ultimate liminal nightmare: architecture that serves no purpose except to keep you moving through it, forever.
Our Backrooms-inspired t-shirt captures this modern anxiety perfectly—because sometimes the best way to process existential dread is to wear it.
Mirrors and Underground Americas
But what if the familiar doesn't become infinite—what if it becomes wrong? Stranger Things gave us the Upside Down, a dark mirror of suburban Indiana where every space you know intimately has been drained of life and warmth. The genius isn't in creating something alien, but in showing us our own world emptied of meaning. Hawkins Middle School becomes a tomb of education; the downtown becomes a graveyard of commerce. These are liminal spaces because they exist between the living world and death, between the known and the unknowable.
Jordan Peele explored similar territory in Us with those underground classrooms—institutional spaces serving a twisted purpose beneath the "real" America. These aren't just abandoned schools; they're educational environments stripped of their function, existing only to house society's forgotten duplicates. The classroom furniture remains, the chalkboards still hang on walls, but they serve a purpose that perverts everything we associate with learning and growth.
Both the Upside Down and the underground in Us work because they take spaces designed for human flourishing—homes, schools, communities—and reveal them as stages for something far more sinister. They suggest that beneath every familiar environment lies a liminal double, waiting to trap us in spaces that look like home but feel like purgatory.
The Corporate Sublime
Perhaps nowhere is this anxiety more perfectly realized than in Apple TV's Severance, where the Lumon Industries building becomes a maze of beige and blue that seems to exist outside normal time. The offices feel simultaneously retro and futuristic, familiar and alien. But the true masterstroke is the elevator—a space that exists purely for transition, transformed into a chamber that literally splits human consciousness.
The Lumon elevator represents the ultimate evolution of liminal space horror. It's not just a place you pass through; it's a place that changes who you are in the passing. Your "innie" self knows only the office, while your "outie" self knows everything else. The elevator becomes a threshold that doesn't just separate floors, but separates entire identities. It's the physical manifestation of every anxiety we have about compartmentalizing our lives, about losing pieces of ourselves in the spaces between who we are at work and who we are at home.
This connects to something deeper about modern life. We spend so much time in corporate environments that feel like Severance's Lumon—windowless, maze-like, designed more for efficiency than humanity. The show makes explicit what we all sense: that these transitional spaces we move through daily might actually be changing us, trapping parts of ourselves in fluorescent-lit purgatories.
The Architecture of Anxiety
What unites all these spaces—from the Overlook's impossible geometry to the Backrooms' infinite banality to Severance's corporate limbo—is their relationship to modern life. We live in an age of constant transition. We move through airports, office buildings, shopping centers, parking garages, and subway systems. We exist increasingly in spaces designed not for dwelling but for movement, not for community but for efficiency.
These liminal spaces in pop culture become mirrors for our psychological state. The endless hallway reflects feeling stuck in life's routines. The empty office building captures our alienation from corporate structures. The parallel dimension suggests our fear that the familiar world might suddenly become hostile. The transformational threshold embodies our anxiety about losing ourselves in the systems we navigate daily.
There's something particularly modern about finding horror in architectural banality. Previous generations feared the wilderness, the unknown darkness beyond civilization's edge. We fear the known too well—the beige walls, the fluorescent lights, the institutional carpeting that represents not the absence of civilization but its most mundane expression.
Wearing the Void
The aesthetic of liminal spaces has become its own cultural movement, influencing fashion, art, and design. There's something almost comforting about embracing these unsettling spaces, turning our architectural anxieties into wearable art. The Backrooms color palette—that specific combination of yellow walls and brown carpet—has become as recognizable as any pop culture icon.
When we wear designs inspired by these eerie environments, we're doing something interesting: we're taking spaces that make us feel powerless and claiming them as personal expression. We're transforming the anxiety of being trapped in transitional spaces into the confidence of choosing to represent them.
Beyond the Threshold
The power of liminal spaces in pop culture lies not just in their ability to unsettle us, but in their capacity to make visible the psychological landscapes we navigate daily. They give form to feelings we struggle to articulate—the sense of being perpetually between destinations, the anxiety of existing in systems beyond our control, the fear that the spaces we think we know might suddenly become foreign.
These stories work because they acknowledge something true about contemporary life: we are all, in some sense, trapped in liminal spaces. We're between jobs, between relationships, between versions of ourselves. We're moving through transitional environments that feel temporary but somehow never end. We're waiting for our real lives to begin while existing in spaces that feel like elaborate waiting rooms.
Perhaps that's why these eerie in-between places have become so central to how we tell stories about fear and alienation. They don't just represent our anxieties—they reveal the strange beauty in spaces that exist purely for passage, for transformation, for the uncertain moments between who we were and who we're becoming.
The next time you find yourself in a long hallway, an empty office building, or any space that feels like it's holding its breath, remember: you're not just moving through architecture. You're experiencing a fundamental aspect of modern existence, navigating the strange territories between destinations that might be more important than anywhere you're actually going.
After all, some of the most interesting parts of any journey happen not at the beginning or end, but in those weird, wonderful, unsettling spaces in between.
Discover our collection of designs inspired by the strange and wonderful worlds of liminal spaces, horror, science fiction, and internet culture. From Backrooms-inspired pieces to classic horror aesthetics, explore fashion that celebrates the beautiful weirdness of these in-between places at Nerd Chic Boutique.
